A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
The answer seems to be a very English version of "as little as necessary." Too bad we don't live in a world as idyllic, but Middle-Earth in general and The Shire in particular are fantasy lands, as Robert himself points out.
In this edition of IDTIMWYTIM, Hank explains why the common understanding of "equinox" is wrong, what the equinox actually is, and then rages a little against astronomers and their stupid confusing Latin terms.
Science! Also, look how young Hank is.
That's a wrap for today's triple holiday. Stay tuned for continuing Emmy Award winner coverage.
Usually, I blog about entertainment to take a break from serious subjects. I can't be all DOOM all the time. Today, I'm taking a break from awards shows to share SciShow and Hank Green telling the tale of The Time England Ran Out of Bones.
Britain's population exploded during the Industrial Revolution. To sustain that growth, they needed a lot of food and, therefore, a lot of fertilizer. Their ports were clogged with boatloads of imported poop and bones from all over the world, until they discovered a rock that was the best fertilizer of all. Ever since, our entire global food system has precariously teetered on access to a precious fossil resource: phosphorus.
A fact I repeat to my environmental science students is that synthetic fertilizers are responsible for growing enough crops to feed at least one billion people and are the number one reason for increased crop production. It turns out I may have been understating their importance...fertilizers have helped feed billions. The BBC went farther, quoting Svein Tore Holsether, head of fertilizer company Yara, reporting that "He pointed out that half of the world's food production is dependent on fertiliser." That was in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about which Holsether told the BBC "Putin has weaponised energy and they're weaponising food as well." Yikes! That's a topic that deserves its own post.
This isn't that post. Darn.
SciShow did make up for a deficit I noticed three years ago.
SciShow didn't even mention the effects of excess fertilizer washing into the environment and causing eutrophication. That's a word I've never used on this blog before, which means I need to write a post about that, too.
Hank and SciShow at least included this effect as an result of (over)fertilizing crops. Count this as a down payment on that promise.
Hank pointed out that the current major sources of phosphorus are nonrenewable and will run out. That's something I've told my students, but it's not going to be fixed until we approach the production peak, much like petroleum. That might happen as soon as the middle of this century. I might not see that happen, but my students will, so they're the ones who will have to deal with it. In the meantime, they can watch this video and turn in a summary for extra credit. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
I'm running behind on grading papers and not feeling like writing the next installment of the Critics Choice Super Awards today, so change of plans, I'm embedding SciShow's Ontario is Getting Taller instead.
Tens of thousands of years ago, large portions of North America and Europe were blanketed in ice. Although these glaciers have been gone a long time, they continue to shape our landscapes in some surprising ways.
There is also an AI summary.
Tom Lum explores how ancient glaciers fundamentally reshaped the Earth's landscape. From the formation of majestic fjords and the fertile soil of the American Midwest to ongoing geological shifts like isostatic rebound, this episode examines the enduring, transformative impact these massive ice sheets continue to have on our planet today.
I just finished lecturing and testing on glaciers and glacial features or I'd show this to my geology students. Maybe next semester, which should be my last.
I'm still going to blog about the Super Awards, so stay tuned.
There's a lot that unites us as humans. How much we sleep, how much we eat, how much we travel... wait, what? Yeah, turns out that the vast majority of human populations have the same average amount of travel time per day. Here's what the research says about why that is, and how learning this could shape our future.
Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)
78 minutes? I've been on the low side of that average time for years, but I did enough to contribute to the average 20 years ago, when I drove 48,000 miles in one year and 40,000 miles per year from 2000-2005. I'm glad I'm no longer doing that. Follow over the jump to see how I'm doing now.
Happy Flashback Friday! I promised "Stay tuned for another winner at the News & Doc Emmy Awards along with a retrospective of posts on a related theme" for today and get to both of those after I lead into them beginning with SciShow explaining How Instagram Hacks Your Brain.
Do you feel addicted to social media? You're certainly not alone. Social media and our brains have a messy relationship, and researchers are working hard to understand what's going on, who might be more or less at risk, and why.
Hosted by: Hank Green (he/him)
Can't Look Away: The Case Against Social Media is the Emmy winner I'm featuring today and it's all about how social media algorithms make the platforms addictive and how they especially harm teenagers. Howtown examined another possible cognitive harm in What the actual science says about "brain rot".
Are TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts actually destroying our attention spans, or is “brain rot” just another moral panic? In this video, we dig into the science behind short-form video and attention, from debunking viral goldfish statistics to explaining real cognitive psychology experiments testing analytical thinking and prospective memory. We break down what researchers actually mean by “attention span,” how infinite scroll and autoplay feeds are genuinely different from previous forms of media, and what lab tests can and can’t tell us about the mental effects of short-form video.
As much as I have proclaimed "Behold the power of the YouTube algorithm," I at least had the choice of clicking on the preview of the intriguing video the program presented to me. With YouTube shorts, TikTok, and Instagram reels, the only choice I have is to watch the next video or stop watching unless I see the preview of the short on my YouTube home page, where I still have the choice to click. It's one of the reasons I generally avoid TikTok, the other being the ownership, both old and new. Do I think the format is making me stupid? No, although it's certainly distracting, entertaining, and surprising, especially as Instagram reels, some of which I find educational. That loops back to Hank Green's observation about Instagram hacking my brain. I like closing loops.
The second loop to close is today's featured News & Doc Emmy Award winner.
After I watched Can't Look Away's trailer, I declared, "I don't have to look at the other two trailers; I think this is the winner." I was right; it won. Congratulations!
Follow over the jump for the final loop, today's featured post from the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News, which was also about a legal action against social media.
Humanity's relationship with the bubonic plague is over 5000 years old. That's right, it didn't just suddenly appear (and then disappear) during the infamous Black Death. In fact, you could still catch The Plague, today! Although the bacteria that cause it could give you a different kind of plague, instead...
Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)
In the middle of her history of the plague, Madelyn Leembruggen mentioned Justinian's plague, which I first mentioned in Pandemics and collapse 13 years ago. My conclusion turned out to be prophetic.
This blog is still about how to avoid the collapse of the current civilization and takes a science-fiction slant on the topic. An asteroid impact is the perfect merger of the two.
So are pandemics. We need to be prepared for them, too.
Volcanoes have caused many devastating disasters over the years, but they're not usually blamed for pandemics. Except that a team of researchers say a volcanic eruption may have caused the Black Death. Here's how.
Hosted by: Hank Green (he/him)
Welcome to one of Commoner's Laws, "Everything is connected to everything else." The next plague pandemic may not need a major volcanic eruption to trigger it. Climatechange or just an extremeweather event might do the trick.
Of course, the most recent pandemic wasn't plague and the next one probably won't be, either. It could be one of the pathogens mentioned in 7 Deadly Epidemics You Didn’t Know Existed.
From the non-bubonic plague that killed a Welsh king, to the deadliest pestilence in 16th century Mexico, to a pandemic we're currently in the middle of (No, it's not coronavirus), here are 7 disease outbreaks spanning roughly 25,000 years of human history that you probably haven't heard of.
You might have heard about a viral study claiming raccoons are domesticating themselves. There's a lot more to the story, though, and it might help us understand what domestication is in the first place.
Raccoons are just taking the first step to being domesticated, which is increased tolerance for humans. That's advantageous to them as wild animals living in urban and suburban areas. They're not alone in adapting to people; "birds change the pitch of their songs [and] city mice have larger brains than country mice" as I first noted nine years ago. Just the same, maybe people, beginning with North Americans, will have raccoons as pets in future centuries. Not now, the raccoons aren't ready.
Conventional wisdom holds that the huge variety of dogs is just the result of humans breeding them to be that way. But new research suggests that dogs have been weird from the start.
Both natural and artificial selection have to work on pre-existing material. One can't just will a trait from nothing. Even transgenic organisms, like Colossal Bioscience's dire wolves, have to get their traits from somewhere, such as DNA from subfossil remains. Dogs are only so morphologically diverse now because they were already morphologically diverse in the past.
Hank Green explores the evolutionary history behind the unique facial muscles that allow dogs to communicate so expressively with humans. This examination considers how various domestic animals have developed specialized traits to better convey their internal states and bond with their human companions.
Yeah, that's an AI summary, but it works better than the video description Hank wrote. Some of the traits of domesticated mammals are ones that evolved for the benefit of the animal, not bred into it purely for the benefit of humans. This is especially true of dogs' eyebrows, which we like, but which help the dog. This shows our relationship is a mutualism.
I'm lecturing about evolution in my biodiversity class, so I might be able to use one of these videos. Even if I don't, I plan on incorporating the information from them next week. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature.
If you've ever done a personality test or read a horoscope and thought, it seemed scary accurate, you may have fallen for something called a Barnum Profile. There's a psychological trick that makes us all vulnerable to personality tests, so let's get into the real science behind personality testing.
When I search this blog's back catalog for personality, I found that I discussed personalitytypes using the Big Five or OCEAN — Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism — or personalitydisorders. Here's what I wrote about my personality type results in We reveal ourselves on Facebook.
My results showed that I was liberal (duh), well organized, reserved, trusting, and calm. About the only one of those findings that surprised me was the reserved one. I generally test out as mildly extraverted on Myers-Briggs, so being labeled as the equivalent of introverted was inconsistent with that. Then I looked at the list of most reliable liked pages for each trait and discovered why. The pages for reserved included RPGs, Anime, Manga, Role Playing Games, and Video Games. I may not like all the pages with those exact names (although I like the suggestions for those pages), but I do like pages about all those topics, so I can see why my results came out that way. Seriously, what these pages tell me is that I am a geek, but not all geeks are reserved.
More than a decade later, I stand by both the personality assessment and my mild criticism of it.
That's a wrap for flashing back to a topic I haven't explored on this blog since the first half of last decade. Follow over the jump for another look back, a retrospective of the most read posts featuring videos from SciShow during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Fossilized poop might seem gross, but coprolites give us critical information about how animals lived millions of years ago.
Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)
That was a fascinating survey of the information derived from coprolites, once I can recommend to my students, although I'm not going to show it to them. Just the same, welcome to blogging as professional development.
Since the SciShow video overlaps with a Howtown video I featured, follow over the jump for the most read entries containing content from Howtown last year.
You've heard of fake purses, and fake food, and fake concert tickets. But fake fossils? Turns out forging evidence of life in the ancient past isn't as uncommon as you might think. From another work by the infamous forger of the Piltdown Man to the carved footprints that fueled a conspiracy theory, here are seven of the weirdest fossil forgeries of all time.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
I knew about Piltdown Man, which is why I blogged about it twice, now a third time, but I had forgotten about Charles Dawson's other fossil forgery, the toad in the hole, which seems lazy in comparison. I hadn't heard about some of the others, particularly the augmented cheetah. Too bad — Acinonyx kurteni was a good name that is now invalid.
That completes the celebration of today's holiday. Follow over the jump for some of the most read holiday posts during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
A lot more depends on fossil fuels than you might expect. Like your medicine cabinet. No, not the plastic pill bottles… the pills /themselves/ might be derived from crude oil. It might be possible to change that and use plastic instead, but we'll need some unexpected help.
Also, this video reminds me that the Commoner's Laws lessons about pollution, "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)" and "There is no free lunch" about the problem and "Nature knows best" for the solutions, also apply to recycling. "Everything is connected to everything else?" Hey, this video connected plastic pollution and recycling to drug chemistry and manufacturing, so it hit all four laws!
That's a wrap for today's post. I'll have more to say about recycling no later than America Recycles Day. In the meantime, stay tuned for another brief educational entry I can share next month, followed by the Vernal Equinox.
You've probably heard the claim that there's a link between acetaminophen aka Tylenol and autism. And there are a lot of conflicting takes about what that claim means, which research is “right”, and what different studies really show. So here’s some of the major studies that are being talked about, their shortcomings, and what it means for all the pregnant and autistic people out there.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary
The study that RFK Jr. is citing and which Donald "Hoover Harding Cleveland" Trump is parroting while mispronouncing acetaminophen says yes, but the other studies Savannah Geary describes say no. In addition, Geary does a good job of summarizing the issues with both the existing research and any studies on the subject. It would definitely be unethical to run a randomized clinical trial, which relates to what I told one of my geology classes yesterday about the limits on the experimental method.* There are some hypotheses that just can't be tested using a controlled experiment; those would require the comparative method.
That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for a more involved post tomorrow as I begin a four-day weekend for MLKDay.
*I was scheduled to give the same lecture to my other geology class today, but the college closed because of weather. Snowday!
In December 2024, 38 scientists teamed up to issue a warning about a potential upcoming global catastrophe. The cause? Mirror bacteria. No, these aren't bacteria with tiny goatees from an evil Star Trek universe, but if scientists ever do manage to make them, we might find ourselves living in a disaster movie.
Life made with molecules of reversed chirality reminds me of a science-fiction story I read 50 years ago, Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny. The novel includes a life form that looks like a gem made of molecules that have the opposite chirality of those in Earth and a machine that reverses and inverts objects and organisms down to the molecular level. Those interact with each other and the protagonist in interesting ways, but the only biological threat I remember Zelazny discussing was the ill health effects to the protagonist, who sent himself through the machine. He realizes that he would have problems metabolizing the normal chirality nutrients in his food. Fortunately, that got resolved before it could seriously harm him.
Running normal bacteria through the machine to create mirror bacteria didn't come up. That would be the subject of a different story, the one that Hank Green is telling. Just the same, the possible creation of mirror bacteria and other mirror life is another demonstration that we live in science-fiction times, or as my friend Nebris says, SciFi is Now.
That's a wrap for today's post. Stay tuned for another brief evergreen entry tomorrow.
Coffee spills more than most beverages. And it all comes down to an unlucky connection between your walking pace, the cup, and that tasty morning brew.
Today's evergreen educational entry features two videos about a common theme, how nuclear fallout helps fight crime. I begin with Howtown's The only good nuclear accident.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union (with contributions from the UK and France) conducted a series of above-ground nuclear tests that led to an increase in the radioactive carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere. This global surge, known as the "bomb pulse" or the "bomb spike", is one of the most distinctive chemical signatures of the Cold War. The radiocarbon spread worldwide, embedding into plants, animals, and humans. Scientists later discovered that this bomb-pulse radiocarbon spike could be used as a precise dating tool. Bomb-pulse dating allows researchers to determine whether biological material formed before or after nuclear testing. This method has been applied to forensic science, medical research, and environmental monitoring. It has been used to identify forgeries in artwork, measure human cell turnover, and estimate the lifespan of Greenland sharks. One of the most important applications has been in tracking the illegal ivory trade. Elephant tusks absorb atmospheric carbon while the animal is alive. By analyzing the carbon-14 content of ivory artifacts or raw ivory, investigators can determine whether the material comes from a legally antique source or from a recently killed elephant. This intersection of nuclear history, atmospheric science, and conservation biology demonstrates how Cold War nuclear fallout became a forensic tool for fighting elephant poaching and wildlife trafficking. More broadly, it demonstrates the creativity and resourcefulness of scientific researchers, who find ingenious uses for datasets of unlikely origin.
Peggy Guggenheim purchased a painting she believed to be by the famous artist Fernand Leger. Almost immediately, there were questions about its authenticity. But it took 40 years and an unlikely group of art detectives to solve the mystery.
Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)
I discuss the effects of nuclear testing in my plate tectonics lecture in geology along with magnetic reversals, although in that case, it's about monitoring underground tests with seismometers instead of carbon-14 from atmospheric tests. Still, these stories would be useful in my environmental science classes as well. Welcome to blogging as professional development.
Stay tuned for another evergreen educational entry tomorrow.
Could rock music one day replace your insulin injections? Scientists are pioneering music-controlled cells that could provide the perfect dose of insulin for type 1 or type 2 diabetes with just a bit of music. Specifically, Queen's "We Will Rock You." Yes, really.
Hosted by: Reid Reimers
The answer is yes, if you're a mouse. If it works in humans, it will really help people with needle phobias. I'm not one of them. I never had a problem with injecting insulin. It was more work to get used to sticking myself for blood glucose readings, but a good lancing device made it much easier for me. Now, sticking myself eight times a day, four for blood samples and four to inject insulin, makes me feel tougher. I tell people drawing my blood or giving me shots that I stick myself so much, what's another needle? That usually gets a chuckle.
Regular readers know I contracted Type I a year ago — through some undetermined autoimmune disease. Diabetes is not bad, as far as chronic conditions go — no surgery, no radiation, you don’t have to die early, necessarily, if you do what you’re supposed to do. In my case, that means swallow four pills a day, inject long-acting insulin every night and short-acting insulin as needed, should I decide to, say, eat pizza or sushi or some other high-carbohydrate food.
What have I learned from a year of diabetes? The biggest challenge is riding herd on prescriptions. Make friends with your pharmacist. To take insulin, you use an injector pen, which requires disposable needles. A 100-count box of 4 mm, 32 G needles costs about $54 with prescription at Walgreens [CVS wanted to charge over $200]. The pharmacist at Walgreens pointed out that I could buy a box, without prescription, for far less. You can get a box on Amazon for $10. They work fine.
A program I know stresses gratitude, and while I can’t honestly say I’m grateful to have diabetes, I can say that, compared to other ailments that have scythed through friends — cancer, heart failure, lung disease — diabetes is a walk in the park, if you make the effort manage it. I would not have picked diabetes, but diabetes picked me, and I’m rolling with it.
I'm a diabetic and...I consider it to be a central organizing fact of my life. Oddly enough, I think it has focused me and improved my mental health. I now have a real threat to concentrate my attention on and consider every day a small victory over death.
I still do and I agree with Steinberg; it could be a lot worse.
This was originally "A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse," and I haven't changed that description even as my focus has changed since 2011. I'm returning to the original theme as I feature SciShow asking What Will Humanity Leave Behind?
When humans are gone, nature will reclaim our cities and break down much of what we've built. But some of the things we've made will last much longer than others, and they're probably not the things you'd expect.
I used to work with zebra mussels, so I'm surprised I've only mentioned them once here and that was a dozen years ago. It was about time I mentioned the invasive species again and what it's done to the Great Lakes ecosystem. That counts as a sign of human presence, because the bivalves wouldn't be in North America without human assistance.
While I'm not surprised that glass and ceramics will last millions of years — one of the stories I tell my students is about quartz grains being eroded and redeposited a dozen times over a billion years, and glass is made from quartz — finding out that bronze survives for thousands of years is something that I should have realized long ago. After all, the Bronze Age in Europe ended nearly 3,000 years ago, and the bronze artifacts from then have survived all that time.
Something else I expected as a sign of human presence was plastic. Hank Green didn't list that, but he did discuss spheroidal carbonaceous particles. So there is something special about the soot we produce from burning fossil fuels!
That's a wrap for today's collapse-themed entry. Stay tuned as I return to entertainment tomorrow.
We all picked up new habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not all of them stuck. Here's the data on whether we're better or worse drivers, exercisers, social media community members, neighbors, and self carers than during and before lockdown.
In the past week of returning to in-person teaching and resuming my pre-pandemic driving patterns, I've observed several people driving just as Krugman described, weaving in and out of traffic at high speeds. While a few Michigan drivers were doing that all along before the pandemic, I think I've seen more this week than the pre-pandemic average. Based on the data and my personal observations, I agree with Krugman that "the pandemic and its disruptions seem to have done a number on social psychology in many dimensions. The worrisome thing is that troubled behavior seems to be persisting even as the country reopens." Here's to hoping that subsides when the pandemic is over, which itisn't.
I also knew about increased social media use, which persisted, and worse mental health, which the stats say has returned to the pre-pandemic normal. What I didn't know about were the Cannonball Run record, increased drinking, childhood obesity, strokes, and drug deaths, along with worse heart health. I can't say I'm surprised at any of them, except the Cannonball Run. I thought that was only a movie. I'm also relieved that driving is improving and the murder rate is decreasing. It give me hope that the rest of the craziness will subside as well.
That's the general driving situation. Follow over the jump for my personal update.
In the southeast corner of New Mexico, the United States is burying decades of nuclear waste. The storage site, and the earth above it, will remain lethal for millennia...perhaps as much as 300,000 years! How can we warn people that far in the future to "Keep Out!"?
It's time to be a good environmentalist and recycle.
As I point out to my students, the worst aspect of nuclear power isn’t the risk of meltdown, as in Fukushima. Very few plants melt down. All of them, however, produce radioactive waste, which is dangerous for thousands of years. Dealing with that is the big issue.
I reinforce that point with the Seeker video I embedded in Nuclear waste in cat litter, which is where I first heard about WIPP. I'm relieved to see that the Department of Energy is thinking ahead to its closure and how to protect people for millennia to come.
We all have to deal with getting rid of trash. But what do we do when that trash is radioactive? Here's a few of the weirdest solutions to the green glowy problem of storing radioactive waste for decades to come.
If this video were shorter, I'd gladly show it to my students. Instead, I'm planning on passing on the highlights the next time I lecture on nuclear power, which will be this December. May I remember it that long.
This month's Rocks Box is the perfect combo of beauty and brains. Sodalite is a gorgeous blue mineral that has a superpower - its tiny pores can trap all kinds of molecules, making it the perfect sieve for everything from industrial practices to cleaning up pollution. And this month's Rocks Box subscribers get their own!
I had no idea zeolites like sodalite were so useful. Any day I learn something new is a good day, so today is already a good day.
That's a wrap for today's Commoner's Laws lessons about pollution, "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)" and "There is no free lunch" about the problem and "Nature knows best" for the solutions. Stay tuned for a driving update, since Pearl will actually pass 70,000 miles today.
The famous Irish Potato Famine was thanks to farming practices and P. infestans (among other things). But are the Colorado Potato Beetle and the climate crisis teaming up to bring about the next potato famine? Here's what research suggests.
No, Niba, you don't need to continue; we get the point. You love potatoes.
The first part of the video is one of the stories I tell my students along with theBananapocalypse, which I've blogged about more often here. On the other hand, I've only mentioned the Irish Potato Famine directly once in Food Day News from Overnight News Digest on Daily Kos 13 years ago and indirectly in Talk like Redd for Talk Like A Pirate Day, when I wrote, "I don't know how to break it to her, but potatoes will cause the Irish a lot of misery about 100 years in the character's future." It was about time I embedded a video about potato blight here, especially one that warns about the catastrophe potentially repeating and connects it to reduced biodiversity in crop plants and climatechange. I only plan on teaching for another year, but I think it might be worth showing to my students. If so, welcome to blogging as professional development.
That's a wrap for today's topic. Stay tuned as I continue my Emmy Awards coverage with the nominees for Outstanding Structured Reality Program tomorrow. Queer Eye vs. Shark Tank!
